Junior doctors have called for a march to the Lalbazar police headquarters on Monday to demand the resignation of police commissioner Vineet Goyal.
This is a relatively new demand from the striking doctors. It did not feature in the multiple lists presented during negotiations to break the deadlock immediately after the August 9 rape and murder of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.
The demand for Goyal’s head was made in the aftermath of the vandalism inside RG Kar on August 14-15 night. Even then it was only one of several demands. The call for the march suggests it has become the foremost now.
The junior doctors had earlier said they were not demanding the chief minister’s resignation unlike some of the political parties that have been part of the street protests.
Apart from Goyal’s resignation, the junior doctors have aired three demands: the state health department must suspend former RG Kar principal Sandip Ghosh pending an inquiry; all those guilty of the ghastly crime must be arrested; and the state government must allow free and fair elections at all colleges.
“We will march to Lalbazar on September 2 (Monday). The police commissioner must resign. As the head of the force, he should take responsibility for the mob attack on our hospital on the eve of Independence Day,” a postgraduate trainee at RG Kar said.
The junior doctors said they had yet to decide the route and time of the march to Lalbazar. “Anyone can join,” a junior doctor said.
The striking medics said they had “always doubted Kolkata Police’s probe” and that their suspicion was proved right when the CBI told the Supreme Court that the crime scene had been “altered”.
“According to the observations of the Supreme Court, Kolkata Police have failed. The police commissioner must resign taking responsibility for the failure. If necessary, he must be brought under investigation and tried,” a junior doctor said.
The police had earlier clarified that an “altered” crime scene did not necessarily mean one that had been “tampered with”.
On August 26, commissioner Goyal had told The Telegraph that the city police had investigated the case for only about 96 hours.
“Our team worked with honesty, integrity and transparency and collected humongous evidence. Our team arrested one person. We shared our findings with the parents,” he had said.
“We also met doctors and answered their questions, and requested them to form a committee of six-seven doctors with whom we offered to share the progress of the investigation. We are fully committed to supporting the CBI in its investigation for justice for the victim and her family.”
The march to Lalbazar is one of several programmes the junior doctors have planned for next week to scale up their protest ahead of the next hearing in the Supreme Court on September 5 (Thursday).
“We have called for a pen-down programme across all hospitals in the state on September 3 (Tuesday). We have requested doctors of private hospitals to join the pen-down programme,” a junior doctor said. “Only emergency services will be kept out of the ambit.”
Patient services in private hospitals have been hit twice already by the ongoing protests. Doctors at private hospitals did not run their OPD clinics and cancelled many planned surgeries on August 17, heeding a call by the Indian Medical Association for withdrawal of services between 6am on August 17 and 6am on August 18.
On August 14, several doctors at private hospitals stayed away from the OPD clinics in solidarity with the junior doctors from RG Kar.
For September 4 (Wednesday), the junior doctors have planned a programme whose details are “still sketchy”.
“The plan is still sketchy but we want people to switch off their lights for some time late in the evening across the country. We will widely disseminate the plan once we finalise it,” a junior doctor said.
The programmes are being spearheaded by the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, an association of junior doctors across medical colleges in the state, formed during the ongoing, 22-day-old cease-work.